Balcony Stories eBook

I thought, ’fi done! You are going
to make a fool of yourself now when it is all over,
because why? It is God who manages the world,
and not you. You pray to God to help you in your
despair, and he has helped you. He has sent you
a good, kind husband who adores you; who asks only
to be a brother to your sisters and brothers, and
son to Clementine; who has given you more than you
ever possessed in your life—­but because
he did not come out of the bonne aventure—­and
who gets a husband out of the bonne aventure?—­and
would your brun have come to you in your misfortune?’
I am sure God inspired those thoughts in me.

[Illustration: “I wept, I wept, I wept.”]

“I tell you, I rose from that bed—­naturally
I had thrown myself upon it. Quick I washed my
face, I brushed my hair, and, you see these bows of
ribbons,—­look, here are the marks of the
tears,—­I turned them. He, Loulou,
it occurs to me, that if you examined the blue bows
on a bride’s negligee, you might always
find tears on the other side; for do they not all
have to marry whom God sends? and am I the only one
who had dreams? It is the end of dreams, marriage;
and that is the good thing about it. God lets
us dream to keep us quiet, but he knows when to wake
us up, I tell you. The blue bows knew! And
now, you see, I prefer my husband to my brun;
in fact, Loulou, I adore him, and I am furiously jealous
about him. And he is so good to Clementine and
the poor little children; and see his photograph—­a
blond, and not good-looking, and small!

“But poor papa! If he had been alive, I
am sure he never would have agreed with God about
my marriage.”

THE MIRACLE CHAPEL

Every heart has a miracle to pray for. Every
life holds that which only a miracle can cure.
To prove that there have never been, that there can
never be, miracles does not alter the matter.
So long as there is something hoped for,—­that
does not come in the legitimate channel of possible
events,—­so long as something does come not
to be hoped or expected in the legitimate channel
of possible events, just so long will the miracle
be prayed for.

The rich and the prosperous, it would seem, do not
depend upon God so much, do not need miracles, as
the poor do. They do not have to pray for the
extra crust when starvation hovers near; for the softening
of an obdurate landlord’s heart; for strength
in temptation, light in darkness, salvation from vice;
for a friend in friendlessness; for that miracle of
miracles, an opportunity to struggling ambition; for
the ending of a dark night, the breaking of day; and,
oh! for God’s own miracle to the bedside-watchers—­the
change for the better, when death is there and the
apothecary’s skill too far, far away. The
poor, the miserable, the unhappy, they can show their
miracles by the score; that is why God is called the
poor man’s friend. He does not mind, so
they say, going in the face of logic and reason to
relieve them; for often the kind and charitable are
sadly hampered by the fetters of logic and reason,
which hold them, as it were, away from their own benevolence.